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Originally Posted by jyl
I agree Greece and Greeks need to undergo beaucoup pain to fix that country. But I think the media is missing a big part of the story. The easy media story is that Greece's problem is too many direct and indirect benefits and that cutting spending (austerity) is the sole solution. That is the story that Germany and other Eurozone powers want to tell. The under-told story is that Greece has a revenue collection problem which is at heart a high level corruption problem. In 2009, Greeks concealed EUR28BN of income which is about EUR11BN of tax revenue lost, which is IIRC larger than Greece's budget deficit was at that time. The primary tax evaders are the higher income and highest income Greeks (business owners, professional class). That happens to include much of the Greek parliament. I wonder why the Greek govt has not acted more forcefully to collect taxes?
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Not all the media is missing it. There was a report on this on NPR about a month ago. I said pretty much the same thing you said here, along with some examples. It sounded like corruption within the Greek government was a central part of the problem and that things aren't likely to change.